Halifax/Antigua Photoblog

Chronicles of the photographic lives of Jenny and Andrew in Antigua

Friday, August 26, 2005

Some notes from Jenny

Several more days have past, and slow and steady progress has been made as we settle into our lives here. Here are some highlights from Andrew and me:

We got a phone… yay! Our number is 1-268-764-5057. Slowly we are becoming in touch with the world. (Anyone who wants to talk to us regularly for cheap should check out www.skype.com/)

Andrew saw his first tarantula – even brushed it, but managed not to get bitten. It even freaked him out a little bit. I’m glad I wasn’t around for that… I probably would have cried.

Met the other "import" teachers. They all seem to be very nice which is good because we have been spending a whole heck of a lot of time with them.

Humming birds are called…I forget…. Here in Antigua, we have lots of them.

Got the internet – unlimited wireless internet. It’s a beautiful thing.

The golf course we will be joining is very wide open and pretty short. Should score well there.

Roosters DO NOT just crow at sunrise. They crow ALL night long.

Animals roam free. You don’t have to own land to be a farmer. You own goats, let them roam the village for the day and then they come home to sleep at night. Goats, sheep, dogs, even horses are anywhere and everywhere. We have a fence all around yard to keep the goats out.
There are goat people and dog people. And dog people shouldn’t piss off the goat people or they will take it out on your dog by poisoning them. This has become a great concern for us – we hope Ellie is going to be safe here.

The Elementary school is really cool… Wooden and octagon shape – although I have been warned it is an actual sauna during the day. Andrew has air conditioning at the high school. Grrrr….

There are many shacks and it is for sure a poor country. But not destitute. And what have come to realize is that you don’t need a lot of a house because you are rarely in it. Most time is spent on whatever type of a porch you have. There simply isn’t a need for big houses.

What can we say about the beaches? They’re perfect.

The mosquitoes love me. Andrew doesn’t get bitten as much. I must be sweet like honey.

Welcome to Antigua…

As we walked off the plane, I was over come with the heat wave that hit me. It was dark out so I did not get an immediate feel for what Antigua was like. We went through customs with relative ease and our principal Wayne and the school administrator, Gilly, waiting for us.

Oh… side note… can I tell you what a fantastic dog Ellie is? Except for a quiet whimper on the first leg, she did not make a noise the whole flight. Not even during the San Juan Rollercoaster What a good girl she is.

My initial thoughts as we drove to our new home was, that the streets are really narrow, in poor condition and people drive really close together and pass whenever they want – which made me a little nervous. (after several days of being a passenger in a car, I have concluded that the driving still scares me). Did I mention that one never stops sweating? (After several days here now, I have concluded that sweat is constantly rolling down my face).

We were pleasantly surprised with our cottage. A two bedroom cottage with the rooms being much larger then any of our past apartments with a kitchen/living room and a huge wrap–around porch over looking Falmouth Harbour. It was only the next morning that we came to realize the real beauty of where we live. JJ, our landlord takes great pride in his property. Our cottage sits on 3 acres that is shared with another identical cottage about 15 m away (two more teachers will be living there) and JJ’s house is way at the top of the property. Walking around our land is like taking a walk in point pleasant park: there are several mango trees (with lots and lots of fresh mangos waiting for us to pick and eat), a bananna tree, a guava tree, lots of exotic plants, and some other fruiting trees (but we don’t what they are yet!). Ellie has lots of room to roam. JJ has a dog Maggie that is always down with us. She’s not used to dogs and is timid around Ellie, but slowly they are working things out.

Our first day was filled with unpacking in the morning and then a beach break in the afternoon. The water is literally bath water and crystal clear - nothing that I have ever experienced before. We stopped by the little grocery market a couple of minutes from our house to see what we could get. And they had almost everything that we will need including tofu and soy milk! (Although both are expensive.) But the staples, grains, pasta, beans, and lots of fresh fruit and vegetables are always minutes away from our house. After about our third shower and several dips in the ocean, we headed to Wayne’s for dinner – hung out, chatted, drank, swam – a very nice time indeed. By the end of the day, we were feeling like this place was going to work out quite nicely.

Day two consisted of finishing up the unpacking. Although we don’t have much here, constant breaks are needed – oh it’s hot. We are going through water like crazy. And showering all the time. To celebrate finishing setting up our new home, we headed to the beach for a dip. Later Andrew went down to the sports club to play tennis with Wayne and some other folks. We’re thinking of joining the club. Lots of great people, however in a country of mostly black people, the club members are almost exclusively all white and British – which is a little weird.

We headed to St. John’s (the capital and big) city to do some shopping and set up our phone, and we also went to the "mall" where the big grocery store is – The Epicurean. The grocery store is just like the big ones back home except, in addition, it has liquor. We’re talking veggie burger, curries, dog supplies – everything. It’s all a matter of whether or not you are willing to pay the cost. It is nice to know that these luxuries are there if we decide we want them occasionally. The phone, however, did not go so well. Organized line-ups don’t seem to be existent so you never know your turn. And nothing moves quickly. I finally got to talk to someone only to discover that we need our passports to set up an account, so we headed back deciding we will come back again tomorrow.

The next day we hit the local bus system, which gets us to St. John’s with relative ease. As we waited yet again at the phone/internet store, we were informed that their system is down and that we would have to come back on Monday. Sigh…. We’ll give it another try on Monday. Since we were in St. John’s, we decided to explore the city a little. Lots of old and brightly painted buildings outline the streets. Although St. John’s isn’t a beautiful town, it does have a lot of charm to it: narrow streets, deep gutters, lots of street vendors, and old military feel. Since we are white, we are considered tourists and therefore get asked if we would like to buy anything and everything. Therefore, we don’t have any pictures of it yet because we already feel too touristy when we are there. We hunted out an amazing little vegetarian restaurant that just blew us away. Meatless meatballs and sweet and sour tofu were ordered and devoured along with the best smoothie I have ever had. You just can’t beat fresh mangos, pineapples, and coconuts.

As I write from our porch, I rain storm blows by. It adds to the lazy afternoon I am having. It’s been hard to think about school these days. We mostly spend (and been encouraged to do so by Wayne) our time getting settled and putting our lives in order. Next week I think that I’ll start doing some work from home. But the lazy laid pack attitude of the island has spread to the school. They haven’t even been able to find the grade four school books yet. Here, one can only move as fast as the next person. Patience is a great attribute.

August 16, 2005 - the journey

It all started Tuesday August 16th, 2005. Andrew, Ellie, and I got up at 3:15 am to do our final packing and headed onward to the airport. My parents and Andrew’s mom were there to send us off, and I must say there were much fewer tears than I expected. Whew! We got our Timmy Ho Ho’s and waited. And waited. And waited. We were informed by another person on our flight that the delay was due to the fact that it took US so long to check in (because we had 6 pieces of luggage). She said that it put them far behind. We thanked her for her opinion and tried to avoid her for the rest of the wait. But the wait went on and on and we later learned it was due to weather. Not lil’ ol’ me and Andrew. We finally get on the plane and waited… again. And waited. Apparently the toilet wasn’t working so they had to rush up a repair person. At this point we are starting to get nervous about missing our connection. The repair person came and left only to have confirmed that yes it was indeed broken. So the only option was to deplane, let everyone use the washroom and the board again. We had a nice pee break, boarded yet again and eventually we did take off; however at this point, we know full well that we have missed our connection and were fearing there might not be another connection in San Juan to get us to Antigua. The thought of having to deal with 4 massive bags of luggage, 2 bikes in boxes, and one freaked out dog with the possibility of overnighting in an airport was not very appealing. Luckily they had rebooked us on later flights and we still were gonna make it, just a few hours later.

We arrived at JFK only to meet much less friendly people. We were given a porter to help us bring our luggage to the appropriate floor and I don’t know if we have ever met anyone that useless before. We arrived at the elevator and the porter concluded that the bags were too wide to fit in it while on the pushcart. And he just stood there. Several minutes passed with no ideas from him so Andrew took it upon himself to unload each bag into the elevator, and throw the pushcarts on top and then reload them on the next floor. All while the porter watched. We have now started to feel sketchy as to whether this guy even know where our luggage is supposed to go and are feeling somewhat pessimistic that our luggage will even get on the plane. But it went down one of the many chutes and so we headed to our gate. After a sandwich, a dog walk, and a few calls to people in Antigua to let them know we are going to be late, we boarded the plane. And we waited. And waited. The wind had changed directions just as we were getting ready for take off, so we had to switch runways – which led to a loooong line up of planes all needing to do the same thing. After another hour of waiting we were starting to get nervous yet again that we might miss our next connection. We figured there is nothing we can do at this point, so we sat back and enjoyed the flight. (Andrew’s note – "Fever Pitch" was the movie feature. It was unimaginably bad)

Finally, we started our decent to San Juan. This is undoubtedly the scariest decent I have ever experienced. As we started to land, we flew into a storm. The plane jerked up and down – it’s the closest thing to a roller coaster I’ve been on in a long long time. And the first time I actually needed my seatbelt. Kids are crying, people are screaming (me for one – I swear, the scream just slipped out!). Just as we get close to landing the plane it starts back up again. Apparently the pilot lost sight of the airport so he decided to not risk a landing. We hung out in the sky for a while waiting for the storm to calm down and tried again. This attempt was still pretty rocky but we managed to land the plane. We all clapped and cheered… we were on the ground. We wasted no time thinking about the near death experience we just had, because we had literally no time to spare if we were going to make our final flight. We took off down the airport, running all the way, only to hear our names being paged as a last call to board the plane. We boarded the shuttle and sunk into our seats on the 20 passenger plane. We were finally going to make it to Antigua. And to top it all off, just before we took off, we watched all six pieces of our luggage be put onto the plane. And, in the words of Almost Famous, "It’s all happening."